Romney’s Biggest Weakness

It’s not his lying. It’s not his flip-flopping. It’s not his bullying. It’s not his woodenness. It’s not his weird vocabulary. It’s not his Swiss bank accounts. It’s not his Bermuda slush funds. It’s not his car elevators. It’s not his dancing horses. It’s not his freshly pressed jeans. It’s not his empty rhetoric. It’s not his inability not to act like an asshole when somebody gives him a cookie. It’s not even his new-found right-wing extremism.

No, Mitt Romney’s biggest weakness — the weakness that’s beginning to define him and that may sink him — is that he thinks he can play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. Here’s Romney mouthpiece Ed Gillespie with David Gregory yesterday:

GREGORY: He was still financially linked to Bain. And of course, a lot his fortune is due to his time with Bain. Even when he was on leave, does he stand by the business decisions that were made by the firm he created?

GILLESPIE: He actually retired retroactively at that point. He ended up not going back to the firm after his time in Salt Lake City. So he was actually retired from Bain.

You’ve got to be kidding. “Retire retroactively”? What does that mean?

I’ll tell you what it means. It means you’re MITT FUCKING ROMNEY, and you’ll do whatever you please, whenever it pleases you. And you’ll CALL IT whatever you damn well please, too.

Romney’s private equity career is like Schrödinger’s Cat: At any given point in time, Mitt Romney worked for Bain Capital and didn’t work for Bain Capital. He could be working there right now, for all you know.